On the heels of an IT error leading to Great Western Rail advertising a first-class journey from Taunton to Trowbridge for £10,000 comes an exponentially more expensive offer from National Rail.
Our thanks to Reg reader Andrew for sending this screenshot in, dug up from his personal chuckle archives, advertising the "cheapest …

Canada's Competition Bureau has administered what it thinks is a stinging fine for Amazon, but it's unlikely that CEO Jeff Bezos will be losing much sleep over it.
The bureau ruled that Amazon was misleading Canucks by comparing its prices with a so-called list price to illustrate what savings could be had. But the list price …

Blighty's advertising regulator has vowed to clamp down on "misleading" broadband advertising prices, following its findings that three in four people are unable to work out true cost of broadband deals.
The Advertising Standards Authority said the move is a response to joint research with Ofcom, which found the current …

The European Commission has opened two antitrust investigations into possible abusive behaviour by chipzilla Qualcomm, including allegations of "predatory pricing".
The investigation concerns Qualcomm's baseband chipsets used to process communications in smartphones, tablets and other mobile broadband devices. Qualcomm is the …

Data protection companies have multiplied in the past 10 years and they are locked in a bitter battle for market share.
Before Amazon arrived on the scene, the main options were owning all links in the data protection chain or renting or leasing appliances, with or without attached offsite services.
Thanks to Amazon-style …

Rivals of Booking.com have been invited to have their say over alleged anti-competitive contracts imposed by the online travel agent.
Following complaints in France, Italy and Sweden, the European Commission is co-ordinating a public consultation on the matter.
Booking.com imposes so-called “parity clauses” in contracts with …

A Manhattan judge has finally approved Apple's settlement in its long-running ebook price-fixing lawsuit: $400m will go to readers who paid over the odds, and $50m will go to the lawyers suing the iTunes Giant.
The out-of-court deal was drawn up in June and was granted preliminary approval by District Court Judge Denise Cote …

The race to the bottom in the cloud storage market continues, with Microsoft lobbing lots more free storage at its consumer customers and slashing prices on the paid tiers of its OneDrive online storage locker by more than 70 per cent.
"The landscape is changing to the point that we believe it's no longer enough to provide …

TalkTalk claims it has won a crucial battle in its war on BT's alleged stranglehold of Blighty's fibre broadband market.
Today, Ofcom proposed regulating the way BT sets its prices for superfast broadband – to ensure there's an ample margin between the amount it charges ordinary folks and the amount it charges rival ISPs to …

Canalys Channels Forum
Microsoft's president for the Asia Pacific, César Cernuda, has tried to explain why some of the company's products cost rather more in Australia than in other parts of the world.
Cernuda spoke yesterday at the Canalys Channels Forum in Bangkok, an event at which each speaker's talk is followed by questions submitted by …

Vodafone UK reckons it will be strong-armed into sending smutty text messages to kids, thanks to a new proposal by Ofcom.
The watchdog wants operators to set prices for the duration of a contract in stone or ensure customers are notified ahead of any changes.
Vodafone's full response to the proposal hasn't been published yet …

Google has updated its cloud support packages, and in doing so has opened up another front in its cloud pricing war with Amazon and Microsoft.
The four support packages across the Google Cloud Platform — which comprises App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and other public-facing services — let …

Say what you will about Windows 8; at least the upgrade from Windows 7 is cheap. Or it is for now. After January 31 will be a different story.
Ever since Windows 8's October 26, 2012 launch, Microsoft has been offering retail Windows 8 Pro upgrade DVDs for $69.99. Online upgrades have been even cheaper, at $39.99. And …

Microsoft revealed full pricing details for Windows 8 on Friday as Redmond and its retail partners began accepting preorders for the new OS, which will begin shipping on October 26.
Starting on Friday, customers can preorder an upgrade edition of Windows 8 Pro for $69.99 in the US or £49.99 in the UK.
That's for the full …

VMware wants to leverage its dominance in server virtualization inside of corporate data centers into juggernaut status for enterprise private clouds, and to help that process along the company is rolling out a new enterprise purchasing agreement that will presumably get some grease to the skids and the palms as companies look …

Wireless carrier T-Mobile has what it describes as a "bold" new feature in store for its upcoming unlimited data plan: This time, it's actually going to be unlimited.
Like most other major American mobile carriers, T-Mobile's current "unlimited" plans have their limits. The amount of data that punters can download is not …

The expected hordes of customers gathering to renew Microsoft volume licensing agreements before the planned price hike next month failed to show up, say a bunch of reseller sources.
With the UK price list set to rise between 1.7 per cent to 25.9 per cent from 1 July, the software maker and partners reckoned on a mad rush from …

Dell enterprise disk drive prices have soared by up to 35 per cent in the two weeks following the events in Thailand.
Context data reveals average sales prices (ASPs) for Dell HDDs grew 6.9 per cent as of 31 October but hikes were more pronounced on larger capacity specs, with a 3 per cent rise on drives below 600GB and the …